There were virtually no "computer graphics" in the '70s - mostly just primitive wireframe stuff, like the trench run demo in Star Wars. More sophisticated stuff didn't appear 'till the early '80s and stuff like Tron, and even that - really primitive even by the standards of the 1990's - cost a fortune and took years to produce.
I think that's what Snell & Wilcox pioneered. I want to say the first time I heard about all-digital NTSC -> PAL and PAL -> NTSC was maybe 1985 or so. They had a version of this system when I freelanced for Image Transform in North Hollywood, circa 1982-1983, but there were issues with it. Bear in mind they had to do it in real-time, plus the A/D converters were awful back then. They'd take an analog tape, convert it to digital, convert that digital signal to the other standard, then convert the result back to analog to record on videotape. Messy process, since the digital noise and analog noise influenced each other. The industry was in a long transition, so digital really happened in bits and pieces -- it did not happen overnight. Masterpiece Theater was a major show that got big ratings, and I know PBS moved heaven and earth to make those shows look as good as they could, even in the 1970s and 1980s. Wikipedia says that Snell made their first "Digital Standards Processor" in 1977, but I don't know how widely used it was. I believe Audio+Video in New Jersey (and also later in Hollywood) was very busy with standards-conversion work by the mid-1980s.
Like I said, I saw an ad in VARIETY for digital PAL-to-NTSC conversion around 1976, but as others have pointed out, "Digital" might have been a vague description of what the process actually was.
I do remember seeing less artefacts in Masterpiece's CAKES AND ALE and I, CLAUDIUS when I watched them than there had been in earlier UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS episodes(the old transfers of UPSTAIRS are used on the US DVDs and I've read complaints about that).
Tinfoil hat update: the old A&E DVDs used the old crap UPSTAIRS transfers, the more recent Acorn DVD set uses newer, better ones.
They're currently near the end of the final Season again here, and the picture quality (compared to earlier seasons) is fantastic. The colours all look real an natural, and the blacks are actually black, and have depth.
Everything we did in the 1980s in analogue was redone twice: once in the 1990s for digital standard-def, and then again in the early 2000s in digital high-def. Part of the nature of video mastering is that technology moves on, the transfers and color are all redone, and (one hopes) it gets better with time. This is no different than album mastering. In a perfect world, we have access to the original version for comparison, so we know whether we're really making an improvement or just screwing things up. And nowadays, all film shows are being scanned on pin-registered scanners, so the image is rock-steady... and that helps a lot. (No more weave or jitter, which used to drive me bonkers.)
This has got to be the worst example of a 35mm-to-16mm transfer Viacom did when distributing this series into syndication: Greatest Heroes of The Bible. These 16mm film prints remove both the Schick Sunn Classic Productions and Viacom logos, but Viacom's logo theme tune remains intact! According to the person that uploaded this to YouTube (TheEricCorpInc Logo Channel), whatever piece of equipment was used for this was badly in need of repair at the time of the mastering. ~Ben
From what I've been told by people who worked on conversions(on another forum), the '74 PYTHON conversions were likely electronic line drop transfers, not optical ones. And they really didn't look like optical transfers-they looked like tapes playing at half-speed, but with more detail than you'd get from something shot off a monitor. From what I've read, optical tape transfers were outmoded by about 1970.
vidiot, May I ask you this: what was the approximate year that these following Viacom-distributed shows were first transferred from 16mm to videotape? The list: I Love Lucy (1951-1957) The Honeymooners (1955-1956) The Millionaire (1955-1960) The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko) (1955-1959) Gunsmoke (aka Marshal Dillon) (1955-1975) Perry Mason (1957-1966) Have Gun - Will Travel (1957-1963) Rawhide (1959-1965) The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (1959-1964) The Andy Griffith Show (aka Andy of Mayberry) (1960-1968) The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971) Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (1964-1969) The Wild, Wild West (1965-1969) Hogan's Heroes (1965-1971) Family Affair (1966-1971) Hawaii Five-O (1968 TV series; aka McGarrett) (1968-1980) The Bob Newhart Show (1972 TV series) (1972-1978) Thank you in advance, Ben
Man, I can't remember where my car keys are from yesterday, let alone what projects Image Transform did in 1981 and 1982. My department was all video mastering, though the guys that did standards conversion were literally bout 30 feet away and I saw them every single day for roughly a year. I think it's fair to say that every show has a different story, and often the shows are done by different mastering houses, by different crews, at different times, sometimes on different sides of the country. The shows CBS owns directly (like Star Trek), they've been doing themselves through CBS Digital over at CBS TV City in West LA. Illuminate in North Hollywood did some of the film scanning, and I think they were both doing color correction and assembling at the same time. The Twilight Zones were all done when Image Entertainment opted to release them to Laserdisc and later DVD in the 1990s. I seem to recall that for the Blu-rays, done in 2004-2006, those were mastered by Point 360 in West LA and Burbank. (We made a bid to do all the TZones at Sunset Digital in Glendale, but for a variety of reasons, that deal fell through.) Fox somehow wound up with Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and all the other MTM shows, so they parceled those out to different vendors at different times. A lot of this kind of "library mastering" is done kind of haphazardly. Basically what happens is, somebody inside the studio gets enough orders for a show that they say, "you know, I think we should remaster this series, because it's looking kind of crappy." (I think M*A*S*H was completely remastered at least four times; I did about 3 or 4 seasons of the second mastering, circa 1988.) One hopes that every time the show is remastered -- initially analog standard-def, then digital standard-def, then early HD, then later HD (and possibly 4K) -- it gets better. Studios have become much more demanding in terms of picture quality and detail and color quality, and now it's possible to provide images that look a lot better, mainly because the technology has improved so much over the last 20 years. I really liked doing sitcom remastering, because the shows are amusing, the project is actually lit for TV so it looks decent, and you can get a couple of episodes done a day. I did more than a hundred episodes of Get Smart that way in 1987-1988, all mastered in standard-def digital for Republic Studios, which somehow wound up with the rights to it. Those looked and sounded fantastic, and I think they looked good enough that those were eventually used for DVD ten years later.
Speaking of this...I have been going through some DVD-R recordings I made of comedy shorts (mostly Hal Roach Studios stuff from TCM), going through it and cataloging what I have. This was some years ago and while I was doing this, I recorded some later 1950s Three Stooges shorts from Antenna TV to get them in full frame since the DVD versions are cropped for widescreen (yes, I know that's a whole other subject). Anyway...most of the shorts have a Sony TV logo on video added at the end. It's sort of like the contemporary equivalent of the old Screen Gems fanfare I remember from seeing the shorts as a kid. I think I recorded these maybe 4 or 5 years ago, not exactly sure. But what threw me for a loop was one short, "Knutzy Knights" from 1954, ends and then instead of the usual added Sony end logo, it had...20th Century Fox television!?! Oops. The only thing I can think might have happened, these were probably farmed out to a production house working on mastering stuff from different studios at the same time, and someone wasn't paying attention...
Actually, many early 80s conversions I saw, though they looked better on standard def TV, could have been optical transfers, as they did have a kind of soft look. The 1980 PYTHON conversions may indeed have been optical ones, but looked a lot better than the '74s(which I'm sure were line drops)-they must have come up with a better way of doing them.
vidiot, What you said about different companies doing remastering for different episodes may explain why certain episodes may have "reverse plastered" logos, like on this print of Have Gun - Will Travel: (whoever did the remastering for this episode must really have screwed up... 'cause we hear the 1987 Paramount TV logo theme for a brief second, and then the 1970s Viacom logo unusually shows up!) Strange logo plasterings are not limited to those shows syndicated by the likes of Viacom, Worldvision or Paramount... some PBS shows, such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, also had the same unusual plastering problem at times: on episode 1250, although we see the 1989 PBS logo on this print, we can still make out the 1971 PBS audio under it: PBS Logo (1989) #2 ~Ben
This kinda crap happens all the time. It's a miracle it doesn't happen more often. I'm reminded of the 1980s, when occasionally a company that was making Adult videotapes accidentally got the cassettes mixed up with, say, Disney Home Video cartoon tapes. Oh, it's not good when this happens...
